ManyMouse's website is http://icculus.org/manymouse/

This is a simple library to abstract away the reading of multiple input

devices. It is designed to work cross-platform.

Just copy all of the C files and headers in this directory into your

project, and build the C files. Unless explicitly noted, you shouldn't have

to #define anything, and each file is wrapped in #ifdefs to avoid compiling

on the wrong platforms, so it is safe to build everything without close

examination.

You don't have to build this as a shared library; we encourage you to just

compile the source and statically link them into your application...this

makes integrating ManyMouse much less complex.

The "example" directory contains complete programs to demostrate the use of

the ManyMouse API in action. These files don't need to be copied into your

project, but you can cut-and-paste their contents as needed.

Basic usage:

- Copy *.c and *.h from the base of the manymouse folder to your project.

- Add the new files to your project's build system.

- Call ManyMouse_Init() once before using anything else in the library,

usually at program startup time. If it returns > 0, it found mice it can

use.

function returns 0. Each time through the loop, examine the event that

was returned and react appropriately. Do this with regular frequency:

generally, a good rule is to poll for ManyMouse events at the same time

you poll for other system GUI events...once per iteration of your

program's main loop.

- When you are done processing mice, call ManyMouse_Quit() once, usually at

program termination.

There are examples of complete usage in the "example" directory.

terminal. The SDL test app will fail if Simple Directmedia Layer

(http://libsdl.org/) isn't installed. The stdio apps will still work.

Windows isn't integrated into the Makefile, since most people will want to

put it in a VS.NET project anyhow, but here's the command line used to

build some of the standalone test apps:

cl /I. *.c example\test_manymouse_stdio.c /Fetest_manymouse_stdio.exe

cl /I. *.c example\detect_mice.c /Fedetect_mice.exe

(yes, that's simple, that's the point)...getting the SDL test app to work

on Windows can be done, but takes too much effort unrelated to ManyMouse

itself for this document to explain.

Java bindings:

There are now Java bindings available in the contrib/java directory.

They should work on any platform that ManyMouse supports that has a Java

virtual machine. If you're using the makefile, you can run "make java" and

it will produce the native code glue library and class files that you can

include in your application. Please see contrib/java/TestManyMouse.java

for an example of how to use ManyMouse from your Java application. Most

of this documentation talks about the C interface to ManyMouse, but with

minor modifications also applies to the Java bindings. We welcome patches

and bug reports on the Java bindings, but don't officially support them.

Thanks to Brian Ballsun-Stanton for kicking this into gear.

Mac OS X, Linux and Cygwin can run "make java" to build the bindings and run

"java TestManyMouse" to make sure they worked. Cygwin and Linux users may

need to adjust the WINDOWS_JDK_PATH (or LINUX_JDK_PATH) line at the top of

the Makefile to match their JDK installation.

Some general ManyMouse usage notes:

- If a mouse is disconnected, it will not return future events, even if you

plug it right back in. You will be alerted of disconnects programmatically

different device index, since on most systems, the replug will cause the

mouse to show up elsewhere in the system's USB device tree. It is

recommended that you make redetection an explicit user-requested function

for this reason.

- In most systems, all mice will control the same system cursor. It's

recommended that you ask your window system to grab the mouse input to your

application and hide the system cursor, and then do all mouse input

processing through ManyMouse. Most GUI systems will continue to deliver

mouse events through the system cursor even when ManyMouse is working; in

these cases, you should continue to read the usual GUI system event queue,

for the usual reasons, and just throw away the mouse events, which you

instead grab via ManyMouse_PollEvent(). Hiding the system cursor will mean

that you may need to draw your own cursor in an app-specific way, but

chances are you need to do that anyhow if you plan to support multiple

mice. Grabbing the input means preventing other apps from getting mouse

events, too, so you'll probably need to build in a means to ungrab the

mouse if the user wants to, say, respond to an instant message window or

email...again, you will probably need to do this anyhow.

- On Windows, ManyMouse requires Windows XP or later to function, since it

relies on APIs that are new to XP...it uses LoadLibrary() on User32.dll and

GetProcAddress() to get all the Windows entry points it uses, so on pre-XP

systems, it will run, but fail to find any mice in ManyMouse_Init().

ManyMouse does not require a window to run, and can even be used by console

(stdio) applications. Please note that using DirectInput at the same time

as ManyMouse can cause problems; ManyMouse does not use DirectInput, due

getting mouse input anyhow. This is mostly not an issue, but users of

Simple Directmedia Layer (SDL, http://libsdl.org/) may find that it uses

DirectInput behind the scenes. We are still researching the issue, but we

recommend using SDL's "windib" target in the meantime to avoid this

problem.

most users (XFree86/x.org X server) will not find this useful, since XInput

is either not included or not configured properly. In the short term, most

Linux users should favor the evdev target, below. For now, the XInput

target will refuse to work unless it sees more than one mouse, since in

those cases, the system is possibly misconfigured. XInput currently doesn't

support hotplugging, although the x.org people are planning to extend the

spec to support this. If you want to use the XInput target, make sure you

link with "-ldl", since we use dlopen() to find the X11/XInput libraries.

You do not have to link against Xlib directly, and ManyMouse will fail

gracefully (reporting no mice in the ManyMouse XInput driver) if the

libraries don't exist on the end user's system. Naturally, you'll need

the X11 headers on your system. You can build with SUPPORT_XINPUT defined

to zero to disable XInput support.

that ManyMouse can function with or without an X server. Please note that

the next major release of x.org's X server will grab the devices at the

kernel level, and will make this interface useless...eventually, their

XInput implementation will implement hotplugging and such, making it the

favorable ManyMouse target for most Linux users.

or without a GUI. There are Java bindings available, too, letting you use

ManyMouse from any of the official Mac application layers. This code may or

may not work on Darwin (we're not sure if IOKit is available to that

platform); reports of success are welcome. If you aren't already, you will

need to make sure you link against the "Carbon" and "IOKit" frameworks once

you add ManyMouse to your project.

- Support for other platforms than Mac OS X, Linux, and Windows is not

planned, but contributions of implementations for other platforms are

welcome.

Please see the file LICENSE in the source's root directory.

This library was written by Ryan C. Gordon <icculus@icculus.org>.

--ryan.